WillPower!

WillPower!, Montgomery College's Annual Shakespeare Festival in Maryland, returns this spring with the National Players touring production of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and a full week's worth of workshop leaders, guest artists, and lecturers.

The college's Rockville campus will feature the majority of events April 1–5, including Romeo and Juliet at the campus's Theatre Arts Arena on Thursday, April 4 at 7 p.m. Other events are scheduled for the Germantown and Takoma Park campuses.

Admission for Romeo and Juliet and all WillPower! events is free and open to the public.

WillPower! also features its annual Adrian Webber Memorial Lecture, with this year's presentation on “Becoming Juliet” given by Dr. Gerard Passannante, associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. His talk will use the figure of Juliet to discuss more broadly the idea of “transforming” and “becoming” in Shakespeare, examining how it is that we can know the inner life of a character simply by observing “two hours' traffic” upon the stage.